Under Construction: Frontier Infrastructure in Northeast India

This article investigates encounters between infrastructure projects and Indigenous communities in Northeast India. Focusing on two projects by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation in the Dollungmukh region of Arunachal Pradesh, namely the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project (SLHEP) and a Nyder Namlo (prayer hall), it shows how a large-scale, long-drawn-out construction process has become the turf for intense encounters between local communities, the state, and infrastructural technologies. Projects such as these function as a form of infrastructural optics, through which the state materially and discursively manifests itself and thereby constantly reaffirms and adjusts the material and discursive scaffolding of this frontier region. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article demonstrates how the construction of the SLHEP, one of India’s largest dams, has reshaped the local political economy, aspirations, and social relations. The article also highlights how the Nyder Namlo serves as a critical convergence point where state-making and efforts to undergird the collective life of local communities blend through the construction regime across multiple material and discursive realms.